How to Be the Pack Leader: Why I Was Wrong About Dominance

For most of my career I taught leadership. I told pet parents that their dog needed clear structure at the top of a household hierarchy, and that a great many behavior problems traced back to a dog who did not know their place in it. I wrote it down, I published it on this page, and I coached families through it in their living rooms.

I was wrong. Not slightly wrong, and not wrong in a way that time has softened. The underlying model was built on a misreading of wolf behavior that the researcher responsible spent the back half of his career trying to correct, and the practices that followed from it made a lot of anxious dogs worse.

I have spent more than thirty-five years in this field, over half of it on the wrong side of this question. That is uncomfortable to put in writing. It also happens to be the most useful thing I can offer someone who found this page by searching for pack leadership, because I am not arguing against a position I never held.

What This Page Used to Say

The original version opened with the claim that dogs evolved as pack animals and therefore need clearly defined leadership at home. It went on to say that pushiness, demanding behavior, uncooperativeness, anxiety, over-attachment, fears, and separation problems could all point to a household where leadership had not been established.

From that premise came a list of roughly a dozen instructions. Control the food and remove free access to it. Do not let the dog reach the door first. Own the toys and decide when play begins and ends. Make the dog yield space and get off furniture on request. Make the dog wait at doorways and go through after you. Ignore attention seeking. Ignore the dog for the first ten minutes after any separation. Enforce long stays. Interrupt jumping by stepping on a dragline.

I am summarizing rather than reprinting it, deliberately. That advice does not need to stay in circulation, and pulling any single line out of context is exactly how it spreads.

Read as a group, every one of those instructions does the same thing. Each one takes something the dog wants, puts it behind a human decision, and treats the dog’s compliance as evidence of a repaired relationship. That is the model. Access is the currency, and leadership is the story told about who controls it.

Where the Pack Idea Came From, and Why It Collapsed

The dominance model in dog training traces largely to research on captive wolves conducted in the middle of the last century. Unrelated adult wolves were housed together in enclosures, and researchers observed a great deal of conflict and rank-related aggression. From that, a picture emerged of wolf society as a competitive hierarchy in which individuals fight their way to the top, and dog training borrowed the picture wholesale.

The problem is that captive wolves forced together in an enclosure behave nothing like wolves in the wild. David Mech, the biologist whose work did the most to popularize the alpha concept, later published a direct correction. Wild wolf packs are family groups. The animals at the center are the breeding pair, and their status comes from being the parents of the other members, not from winning contests. Mech has spent decades asking publishers to stop reprinting his earlier framing.

So the foundation was a misdescription of wolves. On top of that sits a second problem, which is that dogs are not wolves. Domestication ran for many thousands of years and produced a different animal with a different social life. Even if the captive wolf picture had been accurate, applying it to a labrador in a kitchen in Phoenix would require an argument nobody has successfully made.

Bradshaw, Blackwell, and Casey examined whether dominance is a useful construct for understanding domestic dog behavior and concluded that it is not, and that its persistence in training owes more to habit than to evidence.

The Mechanism Problem

Here is the part that mattered most to me when I finally worked through it honestly.

Some leadership exercises do change behavior. That is why they persisted. A dog who is made to wait at doorways will often wait at doorways. A dog whose toys are controlled will often become less pushy about toys.

But look at how the change happens. The dog is denied something they want, and access is restored on a human condition. That is negative reinforcement and, when the dog is corrected for getting it wrong, positive punishment. The behavior changes because the dog is avoiding an unpleasant outcome, not because anything about how the dog feels has improved.

This is the same logic that runs through every aversive tool. If a method works, it works through a mechanism, and the mechanism here is pressure. Calling it leadership does not change what is happening in the learning. It only changes what we tell ourselves about it.

And that distinction becomes critical the moment the presenting problem is emotional. A dog who is frightened does not become less frightened because a person went through a doorway first. The fear is untouched. What often changes is the dog’s willingness to show it.

The Part That Did Real Harm

If I could remove one paragraph from everything I published during those years, it would be the claim that anxiety, over-attachment, fears, and separation problems indicate a lack of leadership in the home.

That sentence sent pet parents in exactly the wrong direction. A family whose dog panics when left alone read that their dog was pushing for status, and set out to demonstrate authority to an animal in genuine distress.

The specific instruction attached to it was worse. The article told pet parents to ignore the dog for the first ten minutes after any separation, and stated that for dogs with significant separation issues this should happen every time the person reentered the room.

Separation anxiety is a panic disorder. The dog is not being demanding. The dog is experiencing something closer to what a person experiences during a panic attack, and the physiology backs that up. Instructing a family to withhold contact from a dog in that state, repeatedly, every day, does not build independence. It confirms to the dog that reunion is unpredictable, and it removes the one thing that reliably ends the panic.

I do not know how many dogs got worse because of that advice. I know it was not zero, and I have thought about it more than once. If you are living with a dog who cannot be left alone, that problem has an actual treatment protocol, and it is described on the separation anxiety training page.

Going Through the Rest of It

The remaining instructions fail in a few recognizable ways, so it is worth grouping them.

Controlling resources to establish rank. Feeding on a schedule is often sensible, and owning the toys can help a dog who has trouble settling. But the reasons are practical: predictability, appetite for training, and preventing conflict. None of it establishes rank, because rank is not the thing being negotiated. When the same advice is given to a dog who guards resources, it can make matters considerably worse by increasing the value of something already scarce in the dog’s estimation.

Making the dog yield space. The original told pet parents to insist the dog get off furniture on request, and to contact a trainer if the dog growled or showed teeth in response. The instinct to seek help was right. The framing was not. A dog growling when asked to move off the couch is guarding a resting place, and that is a behavior problem with a treatment plan, not a leadership deficit. Treating it as a challenge to authority is precisely how these cases turn into bites. There is more on this in the article on resource guarding a pet parent.

Doorways, thresholds, and going first. There is no evidence that order of passage through a doorway means anything to a dog about household structure. Teaching a dog to wait at an open door is genuinely worth doing, for the ordinary reason that doors open onto streets. Teach it as a behavior with reinforcement, not as a ritual about precedence.

Ignoring attention seeking. This is extinction, and extinction has predictable side effects. The behavior usually gets bigger and more intense before it fades, and frustration rises with it. In an already anxious dog that is a poor trade. Teaching the dog what to do instead, and reinforcing that, gets to the same place without the fallout.

Physical interruption. Stepping on a dragline to stop jumping, body blocking, and putting the dog back into position are all corrections. Mild ones, but corrections, and they carry the same risks as any other positive punishment: suppression rather than learning, fallout onto whatever the dog associates with the moment, and damage to the dog’s willingness to try things around you.

Restraint for grooming. The original suggested tying the dog to something sturdy for grooming sessions. Restraining an animal who is already uncomfortable with handling teaches the animal that handling is something to endure and escape is impossible. Cooperative care does the opposite. The dog is taught a way to say yes and a way to say no, and the work proceeds only while the dog keeps saying yes.

Limiting talk to reduce anxiety. There is a small point buried here, which is that frantic human energy does not help an aroused dog. But an anxious dog is not anxious because of ambient conversation, and quieting the house is not a treatment.

What Actually Works

Removing a bad framework leaves an obvious question. If the household does not need a hierarchy, what does it need?

Predictability, mostly. Dogs do extremely well when the world makes sense: when the same things reliably produce the same outcomes, when the person is a consistent source of good things, and when nothing frightening arrives without warning. That is not leadership in the dominance sense. It is simply being trustworthy.

Then clear teaching. If you want a behavior, teach it and pay for it. A dog who has been reinforced for settling on a mat will settle on a mat, and there is no need to construct a story about rank to explain why.

And for the problems that brought most people to this page in the first place, the fear and the anxiety and the reactivity and the guarding, the work is emotional. Counterconditioning and desensitization change how the dog feels about the thing that sets them off. When the emotion shifts, the behavior follows, and it stays changed because nothing is being held down.

Reading the dog matters more than any of it. Most of what a worried dog says is quiet, and the ability to notice the stillness, the turned head, and the flick of white at the corner of the eye is worth more than any protocol. The dog body language guide covers it in detail.

Why I Changed

Not because of one study or one conversation. It was slower and less flattering than that.

I kept seeing dogs who complied and were not better. Aggression cases where the growling stopped and the biting did not. Anxious dogs who looked calmer and were not calm. The results I was getting were real in the short term and hollow underneath, and eventually the pattern was too consistent to keep explaining away.

When I finally read the research properly rather than reading around it, the evidence was not close. Herron and colleagues documented aggressive responses to confrontational techniques in a substantial share of the dogs those methods were used on. Ziv reviewed the literature on aversive methods and found consistent associations with stress and increased aggression. The convergence runs across studies, countries, and methodologies, and it does not favor the way I used to work.

The hardest part was not accepting the science. It was accepting that I had spent years teaching families things that were not true, in good faith, with confidence. I leave this page up rather than deleting it because the record ought to exist, and because a pet parent who is currently being told their frightened dog needs a stronger leader deserves to hear from someone who used to say it.

If Your Dog Needs Help

If you came here because something is going wrong at home, whether that is aggression, fear, anxiety, reactivity, guarding, or a dog who cannot be left alone, none of it is a leadership problem, and none of it is your dog trying to run the household. It is an emotional problem with a treatment plan, and it responds to the right one.

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If you would like the full evidence base rather than my account of it, it is laid out in The Scientific Case Against Aversive Dog Training Equipment and Methods.

About the Author

Will Bangura, M.S., CAB-ICB, CBCC-KA, CPDT-KA, FDM, FFCP is a Certified Canine Behaviorist with more than thirty-five years of experience, specializing in aggression, reactivity, fear, anxiety, and compulsive behavior. He is one of only three CAB-ICB credentialed professionals in the United States and the only one in Arizona. A former balanced trainer, he crossed over to fully force-free methods and now works exclusively with evidence-based behavior modification. He is the author of Sniff to Soothe, hosts the Dog Training Today podcast, and serves as a court-recognized expert witness in canine behavior. Read his full biography.

References

Bradshaw, J. W. S., Blackwell, E. J., & Casey, R. A. (2009). Dominance in domestic dogs: Useful construct or bad habit? Journal of Veterinary Behavior, 4(3), 135–144. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jveb.2008.08.004

Herron, M. E., Shofer, F. S., & Reisner, I. R. (2009). Survey of the use and outcome of confrontational and non-confrontational training methods in client-owned dogs showing undesired behaviors. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 117(1–2), 47–54. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2008.12.011

Mech, L. D. (1999). Alpha status, dominance, and division of labor in wolf packs. Canadian Journal of Zoology, 77(8), 1196–1203. https://doi.org/10.1139/z99-099

Ziv, G. (2017). The effects of using aversive training methods in dogs: A review. Journal of Veterinary Behavior, 19, 50–60. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jveb.2017.02.004